New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said Sunday that 280 more people had died in New York, another drop after a slight uptick the previous day.

A number of Eastern states announced that they would band together to purchase and allocate the massive amounts of personal protective equipment and medical equipment needed to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking in a joint virtual news conference, the governors of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Delaware said that by aggregating their orders, they expected to be able to purchase at lower prices and better stabilize the supply chain.

The governors of Massachusetts and Rhode Island were not present at the conference, but Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that all seven states that had agreed in April to coordinate their re-openings would be included.

"We will buy as a consortium, PPE, medical equipments, ventilators, whatever we need to buy," Mr. Cuomo said, before turning to each of the other governors in turn.

Over the next three months, they said, their states will seek to identify suppliers within the country or regionally who can scale to meet the demand of the entire region.

In addition, the five states are jointly discussing how to use alternate methods of production, such as 3-D printers, to improve efficiency. In New York City, for example, a 3-D printing company is now producing tens of thousands of nasal swabs daily to be used in coronavirus tests.

Source: The New York Times